Letters

Our House in Order
Ellen McGarrahan's cover story "Heartbreak Hotel" (Jan. 24) shows how close to the edge of homelessness many San Franciscans live and how important it is to provide decent, low-rent housing. We at the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation (TNDC) have been protecting, preserving, and maintaining this housing as a key in our strategy to prevent homelessness for 15 years.

While the story of the poor conditions and apparent lack of ownership at the Columbia Hotel is heartbreaking, your readers should know the Tenderloin does have many high-quality, low-income residential buildings. From modest beginnings in 1981, the TNDC now owns or manages almost 700 units in 11 buildings in the Tenderloin and Western Addition, housing over 1,000 San Franciscans.

Besides maintaining quality housing at low rents, the TNDC is committed to community participation on its board of directors (one-third of our board seats are reserved for community residents); resident hiring preferences; and supporting neighborhood efforts to improve quality of life, education and job opportunities, health, and safety. We and other not-for-profit community development corporations here and across the city are the other, unseen, side of the story.

Kelly Cullen, OFM
Executive Director, TNDC

Laboring Under a Misconception
I enjoyed "The Laborer-Saving Device" (Bay View, Jan. 24) on Theatre Concrete's Frank Garvey. It was amusing and revealing.

Garvey does indeed do some interesting work, but his grasp of the Marxist concepts that are supposed to be the context of his art is so incredibly limited, narrow, and irrelevant in the form in which he presents them. He is naive and deluded to think that the working class simply needs to "be made aware of" the fact that it is being manipulated in order to have a social transformation, and he is condescending to the worker he claims to be enlightening when he pontificates about how we will "get the message about our exploitation" through his art. We have known -- at least since Marx (Garvey should get out of the 19th century with his ideas!!) -- about our condition and the reasons for it. As the industrial age that gave rise to the idea of class revolution becomes the technological age that further emphasizes the need for it, it is now more relevant than ever to start working on how to bring people together in free associations, toward developing strategies that are effective enough to actually initiate lasting change.

Garvey's kind of theatrics are very provocative, very entertaining, and I believe come out of an authentic and passionate commitment to create an environment for social change. The technological innovations and multimedia combinations he employs certainly can and do contribute something important to any struggle. But can he really believe that the kind of work he does will bring about a better situation for the worker, much less be the impetus to any transformation or revolution? His work is, at best, one small factor, not the voice that will "give us the message."

Go see his work -- if only for a good laugh. Whether that laughter will derive from viewing his robots and their clever antics or from listening to his naive and ridiculous claims to their significance will be impossible to distinguish. If he wants to do work to contribute to the class struggle, he should just do it, and shut up about it: Let the working class itself determine its significance.

Greg Plagiartaud
Lower Haight

Location, Location, Location
How can stadiums in the middle of inland cities be compared to a site on the shore of a narrow peninsula city with a land approach to only one side, with no dedicated parking or freeway access ("$uicide $queeze?" Shafer, Jan. 24)? Muni can't handle a normal commute; what will happen when there are 30,000 more riders? A bad idea is a bad idea no matter who pays for it.

Funding is not the issue. Location is. Even without gridlock, night games (and rock concerts during the off season) will destroy the quality of life and property values of a thriving neighborhood. Imagine 30,000 baseball/rock fans wandering through the neighborhood at midnight.

But, if we are stuck with the Giants and Magowan really wants to build a stadium, how about building on Treasure Island? Right next to "Da Lucky Willie Casino."

Let's hope the voters will once again show more sense than the Giants organization seems willing to give us credit for and defeat Prop. B.

Ed Myers
Tenderloin

Correction
The Night Crawler on Peachy's Puffs (Jan. 31) misidentified the owner. He is Troy Noonan.